About Us

A bit about Simon Halsey - Founder of Little Gems

Wizzybug...For 10 years I worked in a local Bath charity designing many solutions to help children and adults with disabilities. I designed the Wizzbug whilst with the charity DesignAbility (formerly BIME). During this time I worked closely with the families and their children, and had always felt that Wizzybug was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the range of products that could be made available to benefit these children. After 4 years of Wizzybug, I wanted to continue the work developing a new product range at DesignAbility, but the timing was not right, and after lengthy discussion with the new management it was decided that there would be no such development opportunity there. If I wanted to continue designing for these children, I had to leave.

TinyTrax....Options of collaboration were discussed, but again this was not felt appropriate. So I started a new company called Imaginable, and began work designing the TinyTrax powerchair for children from 2 to 10 years old. However, before I left, in a funding meeting with Starfish trust, I was asked to suggest any work they could help fund. So I suggested the Wizzy Loan Scheme. Over the years we had families approach us with children of 3-4 years old. These children would only get a year or less of use of Wizzy, so their parents often didn't attempt to get funding as this can take up to a year or more. We needed to give these children the Wizzy much quicker, and without the need for funding. The Wizzy Loan scheme would achieve this. The Starfish trust genourously gave £50k, and I'm pleased to say that Tony Husband and the team at DesignAbility have gone on to make the scheme a huge success.

Finally Little Gems is born... The TinyTrax is now available to families, who can often get full funding from grant giving charities to purchase the chair. However, I have noticed over the years that parents and professionals in this field were quite often not aware of all the mobility options available to them. Inparticular there was one demo of Wizzybug where the family were furious with their physiotherapist for not knowing about the Wizzy sooner. They had just spent £20,000 on a very big powerchair, and would rather of had the Wizzy. The consequences of poor assessment and provision of equipment can be disastrous for a child. Also a funding charity may have raised thousands of pounds for the wrong solution for that child.

Little Gems will address these problems and more, providing professionals and families with concise, unbiased information on mobility solutions, and the mechanisms for obtaining them.

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